Joining the pink dots in the little red dot tracing gay tracks in singapore

While he cites the opening of creative spaces such as The Speaker‟s Corner, the Nation parties organised by Fridae.com and the successful staging of Singapore plays with gay characters a

JOINING THE PINK DOTS IN THE LITTLE RED DOT:

TRACING GAY TRACKS IN SINGAPORE

TAN YEOW HUI BRIAN

B.A (Hons.) National University of Singapore

A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND

LITERATURE

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

2011

Acknowledgements

This thesis would not have been possible without the help and the guidance of the

following people Through them, I am given my place:

Dr Loon Seong Yun Robin – my supervisor, for the coffee chats and the peidan

chok, without whom, this dissertation remains placeless, displaced, misplaced and

out-of-place

Dr K K Seet – the founder of the unappreciated, but resplendent Theatre Studies

Programme, in the Department of English and English Literature, N.U.S

Alfian Sa’at – whose Asian Boys Vol 2 – Landmarks, was the inspiration for this

thesis and whose generous provision of the performance scripts for the Asian Boys

trilogy, before they were published, allowed my ruminations

Chiu Chien Seen – who generously met up with me to personally pass me a copy

of the video recording of A Language of Their Own staged by Checkpoint Theatre

Yak Aik-Wee – who very willingly provided the performance script of

Streetwalkers

Otto Fong – who generously provided the performance script of Another Tribe

Alvin Tan – who provided a copy of the video recording of Asian Boys Vol 1

staged by The Necessary Stage and the performance scripts of Mardi Gras and Top

or Bottom

Pinkdot.sg – for Pinkdot

Chapter 1: Positioning the Argument for The Examination Of Gay Space In Singapore

1 - 17

2.5 Asian Boys Vol 1 – Dreamplay 27 – 29

2.6 Asian Boys Vol 2 – Landmarks 29 – 39

2.7 Asian Boys Vol 3 – Happy Endings 38 - 39

Chapter 3: Gay Spaces on Stage and Other Places 40 – 58

3.1 Staging Asian Boys Vol 1 – Dreamplay 42 – 46

3.2 Staging A Language of Their Own 46 – 50

3.3 Staging Asian Boys Vol 2 – Landmarks 50 – 53

Chapter 4: Taking Place – Case Study of Pinkdot 2010 59 – 84

4.3 Analysing and Debunking Pinkdot 2010 71 – 76

4.3a Gender Performances at Pinkdot 76 – 78

4.3c Curtains Down, Take a Feather Boa Bow 81 – 82

4.3d Pinkdot as Text-Created Space 82 - 84

Chapter 5: Joining the Dots, Completing the Circle? 85 – 96

Appendix 1:

Tweets One Week Before Pinkdot 2010 109 - 112

Tweets One Day Before Pinkdot 2010 113 - 115

Tweets For The Actual Day of Pinkdot 2010, 15th May 2010 116 - 122

Tweets One Week Exactly After Pinkdot 2010 123 - 128

Appendix 2

Abstract

On the 16th of May 2009, the inaugural Pinkdot, an event supporting the

“Freedom to Love” organised by a group of local volunteers, was held in Hong Lim Park The inaugural event attracted as many as 1000 people, as reported by the

official press (The Straits Times 17th May 2009) Subsequently, the second Pinkdot, held on the 15th of May 2010 attracted 4000 participants according to Pinkdot.sg (2010) The third, held on the 18th of June 2011 saw a reported 10,000 participants coming together, again in Hong Lim Park to form a giant pink dot in a show of support for “inclusiveness, diversity and the freedom to love” (Pinkdot 2011) The event was hailed as a milestone and was celebrated by the gay community in

Singapore, who felt that at last, there was a space for recognition, a space for them

to embrace their sexuality and a space for acceptance

In many aspects, Pinkdot and its aftermath echoed the thoughts of Ng King

Kang, who in his dissertation, questioned if Singapore, with its ever-increasing

imperatives to rethink its economic strategies, would see an improved situation for

the visibility of the gay community in Singapore He concluded that there were

indeed welcoming spaces in Singapore, in part due to the emerging and gradual

changes in the political and social scape of Singapore However his research

remains very much undefined and ambiguous While he cites the opening of

creative spaces such as The Speaker‟s Corner, the Nation parties organised by Fridae.com and the successful staging of Singapore plays with gay characters and

gay themes as salient examples of how there has been more space for the gay

community in Singapore (Ng 2008), his research appears to be a superficial

rendering of the situation in Singapore

This dissertation will explore the Pinkdot phenomena in greater detail: its

impact and its implications on gay spaces and spatiality The research will also

attempt to show via the examination of: The means in which gay space is depicted

in gay plays in Singapore and gay space is staged in Singapore Theatre to frame the

performance analysis of Pinkdot In doing so, this thesis hopes to elaborate on

proposition that the notion of an existent gay space in Singapore is still very much

located in the place of an imaginary and that the arguments proposed by Ng appear

at best, fallacious

The research methodology for the purposes of this paper include: 1 The

critical and semiotic readings of gay plays written by gay playwrights in Singapore;

2 The examination of how gay plays have been staged thus far in Singapore and; 3

The evaluation of Pinkdot 2010, an actual gay event happening in the place, Hong

Lim Park Part of the research methodology also involves the act of Twittering or

Tweeting Via the application of Twitter, 140-charactered status updates which are

stored on an online archive under a retrievable account are uploaded onto a server

in real-time The dates and times are clearly stated on each Twitter post allowing

the researcher to access and reference them easily at any time Twitter provides

researchers a convenient, simultaneous and a concise means (due to the cap placed

on the number of up-loadable characters) of archiving and documenting their

presence in the places visited in the instance they were in those places At the same

time, Twitter also allows the simultaneous posting of the photographs taken on site

using a smart phone‟s camera and this becomes an invaluable source by which the

statuses are verified and validated by means of pictorial evidence

List of Illustrations

Fig 1 Asian Boys Vol 1 – Dreamplay staged by The Necessary Stage – Opening Tableau

p 42 Fig 2 Asian Boys Vol 1 – Dreamplay staged by The Necessary Stage – Scene 1 Agnes‟ Descent

p 44 Fig 3 Asian Boys Vol 1 – Dreamplay staged by The Necessary Stage – Scene 6 Agnes and the

Fig 18 Tanjong Rhu – The Casuarina Cove – ECP with title page of report of what happened at

Fig 19 Programme Leaflet for Asian Boys Vol 2 Landmarks 2004 p 58 Fig 20 Screengrab of Youtube Video of Pinkdot 2010 p 66 Fig 21 Pinkdot 2009 Campaign Video Neo Swee Lin in a Pink Kebaya p 89 Fig 22 Pinkdot 2010 Campaign Video – Adrian Pang p 90 Fig 23 Pinkdot 2011 Campaign Video – Dim Sum Dollies p 90 Fig 24 Pinkdot 2011 Campaign Video – The Closeted Army Recruit p 91 Fig 25 Pinkdot 2011 Campaign Video – Awkward Wedding Dinner p 91

Fig 26 Pinkdot 2011 Campaign Video – The Office Lesbians p 92 Fig 27 Pinkdot 2011 Campaign Video – The Pastor Meeting the Lesbians p 92 Fig 28 Pinkdot 2011 Campaign Video – The Happy Gay Couple p 93

All the pictures are taken by the researcher, and these come in the form of

photographs and various screengrabs from online videos from Youtube.com,

Youku.com and Twitter.com

1 Positioning the Argument for the Examination of Gay Space in Singapore

But we are not in the Yellow Pages The reason is we don‟t officially exist That is officially, we exist only unofficially But if you consider it unofficially, we exist officially but only unofficially so

(Madame Soh in Tan Tarn How‟s The Lady of Soul and Her Ultimate

I do not question What right anyone had

To be there

All I can say is that When their faces and names Were published in the papers

I doubt

A crystal sigh Rippled through Midnight estates Bandaged in peace

I doubt There were boys

in the heat of self-abuse Who substituted fantasies

Of swimming pool buddies With nightmares

Of the lallang‟s serrations And the handcuff‟s click

I doubt Records were shattered

In the department tabulating Indices for Moral Health

I doubt Men walked the streets Assured that their genitals Were safe in the hands

Of the police

(Alfian 2008: 75 – 76)

This thesis resulted from the indignant reaction with regard to the erasure

and the forgetting of gay spaces and of gay history in Singapore The state of gay

space in Singapore, to borrow a term from Rem Koolhaas, exists in a state of the

“tabula rasa” (Koolhaas 1995: 1011 -1035) It is sought out, and razed over until no trace of it remains, or another memory takes its place Even in the theatre space, the

depiction of gay place and space is often fantastical which alludes to the real state

of gay space in Singapore With the advent of seemingly centred and

gay-friendly performance-events such as Pinkdot in the recent years, there appears to be

greater visibility and tolerance of the gay community and hence, an assumed greater

space for gays in Singapore However, it appears that the people of Singapore,

especially the homosexual community, have inevitably forgotten about the

restraints of discriminatory legislation and the persecution of homosexuals in

Singapore, leaving them celebrating albeit ironically their placeless-ness This

thesis attempts to comprehend this apparent flippancy Vis-à-vis the examination of

how gay space is depicted in the playtexts written by gay Singapore playwrights

and how gay space is staged in Singapore theatre, this dissertation will show how

they frame and debunk the performance of Pinkdot in the space of Hong Lim Park The thesis will also attempt to question Ng King Kang‟s argument that the recent years have seen the proliferation of homosexual space in Singapore (Ng 2008)

It is necessary at this juncture, to derive and to distil from a smorgasbord of

definitions, a working taxonomy of the terms, “space”, “place” and “landscape” as

they would be contestable terms that this dissertation would have to grapple with

As Robert Sack has acknowledged, different conceptions of space arise because

conceptual relation and separation from the facts and the relationships can occur at

different levels of abstraction and from different viewpoints and modes of thoughts

While conceptions of space are clearly about abstractions, they also involve

perceptions of spatial relations and how these are described Space often changes its

meaning because we perceive and describe the spatial relations among things

differently in different situations (Sack 1980: 3-5) Uncertainty about the spatial

properties of places is due to uncertainty about their meanings Clearer meanings

would make their spatial properties clearer We would know more precisely where

a village begins and ends if we were more precise about what we mean by a village

(Sack 1980: 58)

The Cambridge International Dictionary of English defines the term,

“space” as a noun – Space is “an empty place (for something)” (Proctor 1995: 1381) In this case, space is seen as an entity to be filled by something else It is

interesting that the term “place” is used as part of the definition for “space”,

suggesting a need to fill a nebulous emptiness with a certain point of reference –

place – “The pile of papers takes up too much space in the room,”; “We must leave

some space for a margin of error,” and “They found a parking space close to the

University.” Space is also defined as an object – as the distance between distances,

periods of time or the distance between the words and lines of a page - “The spaces

between the lines are too wide.” (Proctor 1995: 1381 - 1382)

Simin Davoudi and Ian Strange have done a comprehensive overview of the

foundational theories of space that stem from the fields as diverse as Kantian

philosophy, Newtonian physics and Euclidean and Minkowskian geometry

(Davoudi and Strange 2009: 12 – 42; See also Scruton 1996) While Alexandra

Kogl has written about the political potentials of space:

Tangible spaces do exist underneath and alongside the self-consciously constructed images such places present; the images by no means

exhaust the realities or possibilities of the actual places There is a curious and potentially productive tension between, on the one hand, the rationalised, legible spaces of postwar residential neighbourhoods, shopping malls, suburban arterials, and glossy office parks, and on the other hand, spaces such as old cemetaries, alleys, remnant scraps of orchard, creeks, tunnels, and chaparral covered hillsides The latter spaces are neither hidden nor literally invisible, yet somehow seem unread, unseen, unofficial, unrepresented, unapproved (Kogl 2008: ix) Space is subject to manipulations that seek to simplify, reduce, or render it coherent, but it remains a site of excesses, differences, nonrationalities, hidden interstices, and remnants A liberal political economic regime often organises space into designated zones for production (the office park), consumption (the mall) and reproduction (the bedroom community), creating simplified, legible, and economistic spaces, yet no space on earth can be fully enclosed and controlled

Residents can and do reinterpret the meanings of space, putting existing places to strange, new uses (Kogl 2008: x)

Kogl suggests that spaces are designed to evoke certain behavioural

responses in them and to them Yet some spaces elude or escape notice because

they remain hidden, or are camouflaged to blend in, or have become so everyday

that little attention is paid to these spaces (Kogl 2008)

Christopher Gosden proposes that spaces, consequently, play three roles in

human life They constitute first, room for maneuver, open spaces through which

people can proceed and deploy their skills Spaces, second, set bounds on

movement and physically constrain what people do These first two functions are

material in nature The third function of spaces is to serve as a means of “stage setting” in which spaces become settings where humans interact and that material arrangements are settings for the stage (Gosden 1994) As Michel de Certeau puts

it, “Space is practised space” (de Certeau 1988)

“Place” is a noun that describes an “area” Place is a hall, a field, a plateau,

a town, a building, a country It is mark-able and is marked by certain co-ordinates

on a map – “There are several places of interest in a place like Singapore.” It is also

defined by the ticket number you hold,”; “Save me a place in the queue.” If

something is “in place”, it is in its usual place or position, if it is “out of place”, it is

in the wrong place, the wrong context or does not fit in (Proctor 1995: 1072 – 1074)

A place functions to give a name to a space A place tag serves to name the space

you are seated at, at a table

Parkes and Thrift depict places as a result of the coalescence and

coordination of multiple activities, events and practices (Parkes and Thrift 1980)

Schatzki augments this argument by stating that place is an array of places and

paths, where a place is a place to X (X is an action) and a path is a means of getting

from point A to B (Schatzki 2011) According to Harvey,

The processes of place formation becomes a process of carving out

“permanences” from the flow of processes [that are] creating spaces

But the “permanences” – no matter how solid they may seem – are not eternal; they are always subject to time as “perpetual perishing”

(Harvey 1996: 261)

The work of post-modernists argued that space and place are socially

constructed and stressed that the interwoven nature of cultural practices,

representation and imagination was integral in the production of space (Lefebvre

1991, 1996) For these writers, space and place making was the outcome of cultural

politics; a concern with the ways in which identity and difference were articulated

across space In their rejection of universal notions and definitions of place and

their turn to representation and language, a new cultural geography was constructed Places were conceptualised as “both real and imagined assemblages constituted through language” (Hubbard et al 2004:7) With this perspective, space becomes “a meeting place” where relations interweave and intersect (Massey 1991) Massey thus proposes, “Space is the product of the intricacies and complexities, the inter-

twinings and the non-interlockings, of relations, from the unimaginably cosmic to

the intimately tiny.” (Massey 1998: 37) Yi- Fu Tuan observes:

In experience, the meaning of space often merges with that of place

“Space” is more abstract than “place” What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value Architects talk about the spatial qualities of space The ideas,

“space” and “place” require each other for definition From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and the threat of space, and vice versa Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is a pause; each pause in

movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place

(Tuan 1977: 6)

How space is transformed into place is illustrated in Tuan‟s commentary of Warner Brown‟s experiment of rats and human beings navigating a maze At first only the point of entry is clearly recognised Beyond the entrance, lies space In

time, more and more landmarks are identified and the subject gains confidence in

movement Finally, the space is marked by recognisable and familiar landmarks and

paths and eventually, becomes place (Tuan 1977: 70 – 71) When space becomes

identifiable, it becomes place Intrinsically, place is space that has been named In

its naming, an identity is bestowed onto it Conversely, what happens with

placeless-ness is that the space skirts identification and thus cannot be placed Gay

spaces thus hover in this liminal space of placeless-ness due to their ambiguity, how

they present themselves in ways that defy definition or how they resist

identification

Landscape thus as a corollary of space and place, operates through the

interplay of spacing and distancing It is a mode of representation or presentation of

a place (Malpas 2011: 7) Landscape, place and demographics have inevitably been

explored by physical, human and cultural geographers, anthropologists,

recently by performance artists and academics interested in the study of theatre,

theatricality and performance For the cultural geographers, much of their work

rested on the ethnological assumption that distinctive geographical areas or

landscapes could be identified and described by mapping visible elements of

material culture produced by unitary cultural groups Inevitably such landscapes or

regions were identified as the product of stable, pre-modern and dominantly

agricultural societies whose inscriptions were threatened by the processes of

modernisation (Thomas 1956, Doughty 1981, Pepper 1984, Braudel 1973, Baker

1984, Relph, 1976) Landscape is also viewed as a cultural image, “a pictorial way

of representing or symbolising human surroundings” which may be studied across a

variety of media and surfaces -in paint on canvas, writing on paper, images on film and in “earth, stone, water and vegetation on the ground.” (Daniels and Cosgrove 1987) From the 1980s, there was a paradigmatic shift and landscapes increasingly

became conceptualised as configurations of symbols and signs to be read or

interpreted as social documents (Thrift and Whatmore 2004: 34-36) The landscape

of the city has also been analogised as a form of theatre (Muir 1981)

It might be strategic at this point, to state that space and place can be

performatively re-inscribed in ways that accentuate their factitiousness or their

constructed-ness rather than their facticity, or the fact of their existence This

re-inscription occurs when the artifice of the stylisation of the acts that occur within a

rigid regulatory frame are exposed In this case, such performative acts allow the possibility of asserting a subject‟s agency within the hegemony of the law and provide a means of subverting the law against itself (Salih 2002) Theoretically, if

the city is theatre, Pinkdot is a performance that occurs in this theatre If Pinkdot is

deemed as performative, then it should contest the very notion of space and place in

Singapore as heteronormative It should also be able to discern the artificiality of

the perimeters that contain it However, taking into account J.L Austin‟s

Speech-act Theory in which performativity is defined as an utterance that brings into the

being, the very thing it names (Austin 1962; See also Butler 1990), this thesis

questions whether Pinkdot might be seen as performative or subversive, by virtue of

how it brings (or does not bring) into being the thing it names – gay space

The “theatre is space,” (Ubersfeld 1981) - This metaphor immediately allocates a sense of vastness to the term, “theatre” The theatre is a space of

enactments and possibilities, where different worlds and realms of fantasy are

mimicked and created The theatre also consists of an actual geographic location

and a physical space In the theatre, it is not simply a question of imagining or dreaming of an “elsewhere” or a “not-here”, for the not-here is here, the elsewhere

is materially present, on the space of the stage and in the bodily presence of the

actors and, if it has further dimensions of existence in the imagined places beyond

the stage, they too are continually perceived in relation to the materiality of the stage At the same time, the spectators‟ experiences are grounded in the tangibility

of being in and knowing that they are in a theatre (McAuley 2010: 86) The theatre

is a place and an art form – “An edifice specially adapted to dramatic

representations” and “dramatic performances as a branch of art” (McAuley 2010: 1 quoting Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 1970) The condition of space in theatre

is so important that it is the primary condition for theatre to occur According to Peter Brook, “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage A man walks across this empty space whilst somebody else is watching him and this is all that is

needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.” (McAuley 2010: 2 quoting Brook 1968:

9) The empty space is not simply the means of valorising the actor‟s presence, but

the condition alone that makes possible, the simultaneous presence of performer

and watcher (McAuley 2010: 3) While the specifics of the theatre building and its

accretions, such as the movable scenery, the auditorium, the stage as a raised

platform (Southern 1962: 21) may be removed, the spatial condition in itself cannot

be removed Space is constitutive of theatre While theatre can indeed take place

anywhere, the point is that it must take place somewhere (McAuley 2010: 3)

Although the theatre is the space where an interaction takes place between the

audience and the actor, amidst other visual, aural and tactile stimulations, these

movements and groupings of the spectators, the actors, the objects and the given

space, become meaningful only when situated in the given space, and they in turn,

are and become the major means whereby that space is activated and itself made

meaningful (McAuley 2010: 8) The theatre in this case, embodies Peter Hanke‟s

reference of Bedeutungsraum – it is a space for meaning making (Passow 1981:

237 – 254) It is possible to use a term proposed by Foucault to describe the space

of the stage and of the theatre – The theatre is a “heterotopia”, capable of

juxtaposing in a single real place, several spaces and several sites that may be in

themselves incompatible (Foucault 1986: 22) The theatre is indeed a single real

space that can hold a multitude of places (Aronson 2005: 190) In fact, the word

“theatre” comes from the ancient Greek theatron, the name given to the area in which the audience sat Theatron, in turn comes from the root theasthai, meaning

“to see” The theatron, the place where the audience sits, is thus “the seeing place”

(Aronson 2005: 2) The theatre is hence the place to see multifarious spaces and

places unfold

The space that this dissertation is concerned with is a geographical space

that has co-ordinates and is map-able It is also a cognitive state of the mind Place

then is this space that is named The spaces and the places of this dissertation are

located as mental states, as physical locales and landscapes and for the purposes of

this research, are articulated in the space of the theatre text and stage The spaces

discussed are not nạve spaces, but contain a multiplicity of performances

Keeping these thoughts in mind, there is a need then to examine how gay

space is depicted in Singapore theatre and the performances associated with gay

male oriented spaces in Singapore While geographers and anthropologists have

looked at what is termed queer geography or queer anthropology, what they have

done is to conflate the issues of sexuality with the study of space The term “queer”

used in this context is a contested term with multiple and contradictory roots It will

be taken as an umbrella term for non-normative sexual (and other) subjectivities

(Butler 1990, 1993, DeLauretis 1991, Fuss 1991, Binnie 1997, Knopp 1998 and

Nast 2002) These studies observe how everyday spaces are produced through the

embodiment of social practices and look at how the presence of norms regulate

sexual behaviour in public or shared spaces However, academic study of gay and

lesbian anthropology has focused more on the orientalised nature of sexual diversity

or on the deviant nature of same-sex-related status and role, focusing on finding

practical solutions (but not necessarily so) for issues deemed as violations against

human rights such as sexual oppression, heterosexual privilege, homophobic

violence, employment or discriminatory practices along with the denial of access to

health care and other social services (Leap and Lewin 2009: 2-3) Other exemplars

of such work include: The depiction of drag queens coping with low wages and

bleak working conditions (Newton 1972) and the analysis of community dynamics

in a gay summer resort (Newton 1993); the examination of American Indian

berdache traditions (Williams 1986); the exploration of conflict between parenting

and family formation and lesbian or gay sexualities (Lewin 1993, 1998); the

exploration of teenagers in the United States trying to position coming out of the

closet (the closet is a metaphorical term often used to describe a metaphysical space

to hide one‟s sexuality in) as a rite of passage (Herdt and Boxer 1993); the

suggestions that the language used by gay men extends more than just lisping and

camp vocabulary (Leap 1996, 2001); the critique of anti-gay efforts to mythologise

the gay gene in popular press and other news media (Lancaster 2003) and the

studies of men having sex with other men in private and public spaces (Leap 1999)

Singapore, an island nation state and country located in S.E Asia, where the place

of the homosexual is porous and often imagined, is an anomaly which deserves

greater critical attention, especially from the Performance Studies angle which is

lacking in current academic discourse

Attempts to articulate a semblance of gay identity and more recently, of gay

spaces in Singapore, have been made in the Singapore Theatre scene, but this

articulation does not come without its own mouth clamps To name some pertinent

examples, in 1988, the Ministry of Community Development withdrew its support for Chay Yew‟s Ten Little Indians and Eleanor Wong‟s Jackson on a Jaunt, which dealt with the issue of AIDS via a sympathetic homosexual slant and the following comments were made by the Ministry‟s Cultural Affairs Director, Ng Yew Kang:

Homosexuality is portrayed as a natural and acceptable form of sexuality in the play My Ministry will not want to be a joint presenter

of the play in its present form This is in line with the government‟s campaign against AIDS, and homosexuality is one of its main causes

Homosexuality in Singapore is objectionable (The Straits Times 16thMarch 1988)

Following the Ministry‟s withdrawal of support for the plays, both

playwrights were told that if they made suitable changes to their respective scripts,

the Ministry would renew its support In the same newspaper account, Wong

observed that “The ministry doesn‟t want him [the protagonist] portrayed as a sympathetic gay It wants the gay character straightened.” Wong categorically refused to make the recommended changes, noting that changing the script would mean that the play “would not have the same impact.” (The Straits Times 16th

March 1988) According to Chay, the Ministry wanted to him to change the

character of the gay volunteer worker to a woman which Chay refused to The fundamental issue, made clear by the comments of the Ministry‟s spokesperson, was that homosexuality was not to be depicted in anything other than in a negative

light To stage a play in which homosexuality was a given, or could be seen

sympathetically, was not acceptable (Peterson 2003: 81) The implications are: The

authorities did not state an outright ban from the onset, but gave the provision that

if the gay character was changed to a woman, the play would have been allowed to

be performed This means that homosexuality is an entity that was categorised and

equated with feminity Homosexuality in this case, remains placeless as it can only

be identified as a different gender with no identification terms of its own It had to

be marked via the lenses of heteronormativity to be recognised

In 1992, the censorship restrictions were reported to have been relaxed and

established theatre companies like Theatreworks and The Necessary Stage were no

longer required to submit each script to the Public Entertainment Licensing Unit

(PELU) for advance approval In reality, these same companies had to incorporate their own censors into the creative process, guessing where the “out-of-bounds” or

Theatreworks staged a couple of plays with homosexual overtones or transvestite

characters – Ovidia Yu‟s Three Fat Virgins Unassembled and Russell Heng‟s Lest

The Demons Get To Me but that led to the late Senior Minister of Education, Tay

Eng Soon publicly advising playwrights to be sensitive to the moral values and

sentiments of the majority of Singaporeans:

Ours is still a traditional society which values what is private and personal and is not comfortable with public and explicit discussion of sexuality and what it considers as deviant values By all means, let our

„cultural desert‟ bloom But please let the blossoms be beautiful and wholesome and not be prickly pears or weeds! (The Straits Times 2ndAugust 1992; Peterson 2003)

Tay‟s comments foreshadowed the clampdown on alternative sexuality on stage that took place in 1994 to 1995 Interestingly as the depiction of gay men

disappeared from the stage, the mostly absent and invisible lesbian, took on greater

flesh in the form of plays like Eleanor Wong‟s Mergers and Accusations (1995) and

her sequel Wills and Secession (1995b) as the representations of lesbians were

deemed to be less threatening than representations of gay men In contrast, Chay Yew‟s A Language of Their Own (1995), which was supposed to be part of the same season that presented Wong‟s play, did not receive the approval to be

produced and was pulled out (Peterson 2003) It was only a decade later when the

licensing and censorship regulations were reviewed and relaxed that A Language of

Their Own finally gained approval from the authorities to be staged in conjunction

with the Esplanade Studios in 2006 (dir Casey Lim 2006) As K K Seet notes, the

prerogative granted to established theatre companies for not needing to submit

scripts for approval by the PELU did not overrule the unspoken limits of artistic

freedom and that transsexuality and transvestism often substituted for the honest

treatment of gay male relationships in many of the plays (Seet 1999: 94) The furore,

the fines and the subsequent ban of both performance art and forum theatre over the

“pubic hair snipping” performance art item (which will be examined in further detail in the subsequent chapters) at the New Year‟s Eve 1994 cultural marathon, jointly organised by Fifth Passage and Artists Village provide testament to the

rocky relationship between the governing authorities and performances that were

considered alternative, or vaguely provocative in stance and leading to these

performances being seen as deviant or unsound and thus requiring suppression (See

Seet 1999: 87-94) As Seet observes:

This spawns the ironical situation in which the definitive Singapore theatre, that has relevance, topicality, a social role and conscience, has been exiled This exile is either imposed by self, in terms of timidity and unnecessary restraint, or from without, in other words,

governmental suppression by banning (Seet 1999: 87)

The examination of the restrictions and the difficulties on the

representations and presentations of homosexuality in Singapore Theatre negate Ng King Kang‟s rather superficial claims (2008) He argues that there is a development

of a welcoming space for gays in Singapore, and positions three entertainment

forms which create a greater visibility of gays in Singapore – the Cinema, the

Bookshop and Singapore Theatre Implicit in his arguments is the idea that a greater

visibility of the gay community in Singapore is equivalent to the creation of a

welcoming space for the gay community However, his arguments are fraught with

contradictions and thus cannot hold water

First, Ng claims that an increasing number of quality, gay-related films

made it to Singapore Cinema under the censorship rating Restricted Artistic (R.A.)

with the inherent inference that as a result, there is a greater acceptance of gay

sexuality and its corollary – gay space (2008) However an increased quantity does

not necessarily mean an increased viewer-ship and as seen by the R.A rating, these

films play only to a limited and restricted audience Inherent in his argument is a

contradiction for he quotes Ong Sor Fern,

However, not all gay-themed movies can find their way to Singapore

The Taiwanese film Formula 17 was not shown in Singapore despite an appeal by its distributor Festive Films to the Films Appeal Committee (FAC) The FAC based its decision on the fact that the film “creates an illusion of a homosexual utopia” The plot revolves around an idealistic 17-year-old who falls in love with a 30-year-old playboy According to the FAC, everyone in the film is homosexual and no negative aspects of the lifestyle are portrayed (The Straits Times 22nd July 2004) In effect, the FAC prescribed what messages would be allowed to reach

Singapore audiences, that only a heterosexual utopia can be portrayed, and that all films with gay themes must contain something negative about its lifestyle… (Ng 2008: 58)

Second, that there is a growing amount of

Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgendered (L.G.B.T.)-themed literature found in major bookstores in

Singapore Books written by gay authors are now familiar titles to the gay

community and are easily available on the shelves (Ng 2008) However, this is a

reading that merely skims the surface The increased availability of L.G.B.T

-themed literature does not mean that that is an increase in the acceptance of

homosexuality and as Ng inherently admits, it is a niche that caters to a niche community in Singapore‟s population

Third and most important, Ng claimed that the gay community gained

tremendous visibility over the last 14 years via the local arts and entertainment

scene (in part due to the Nation parties organised by Fridae.com, which would be

discussed in further detail in the subsequent chapters):

Drama in Singapore, itself never a contentious-free area in Singapore

by any means, has nonetheless been one of the few public spaces where homosexual themes have been expressed regularly for many years

Hence, most of the discussions and explorations on homosexuality have actually been concentrated in theatre, resulting in much attention being

drawn to specific performances from time to time Between 1991 and

1993, a number of plays with gay, lesbian, transvestite of transsexual characters or themes were produced out of the creative ferment of Theatreworks‟ Writers‟ Laboratory The first staged work by a Singaporean playwright dealt openly with lesbian sexuality was Ovidia Yu‟s Marrying in 1991 Fortnight Theatre 1991 also presented two plays with gay, lesbian, transvestite of transsexual characters or themes, one which was Ovidia Yu‟s Imagine, staged by Action Theatre, which focused on a dead writer‟s failed relationships with her Caucasian husband, her lesbian lover and her husband‟s best friend The other play chosen by the Ministry for Information and the Arts for presentation at the Drama Festival was Akka (Elder Sister), a short Tamil play that focused on a transsexual prostitute who reveals her story to an imaginative reporter (Ng 2008: 58-59)

In 1992, there were at least three staged readings and seven fully realised productions of 10 plays with gay, transvestite or transsexual characters or themes… It was reported that in contrast with the past, dramas in Singapore with homosexual themes have multiplied, and their expression has also become bolder (Ng 2008: 59)

However, it has been shown that the staging of these gay-themed plays was

accompanied with numerous restrictions and legislative clamps Ng‟s inherent

assumption is flawed, for visibility does not equate to greater space and place A

mirage might be visible but its essence is of a projection and a refraction of light It

is intangible and in reality, the reflected place does not exist in that particular

location

This thesis will show in the subsequent chapters, via the examination of gay

spaces as they are articulated on text, gay spaces as they are staged and finally the

performance of gay space in an actual place – Hong Lim Park, that gay

performances and the stages where such performances are acted out in Singapore

lack efficacy and performativity, and are de-fanged, de-clawed and powerless to

effect change The analysis of these performances will thus question the probability

of whether there is a space and a place for the gay community in Singapore

The research methodology for the purposes of this paper include critical and

examination of how gay plays have been staged thus far in Singapore and the

evaluation of Pinkdot 2010, an actual gay event taking place in a geographic place –

Hong Lim Park Part of the research methodology also involves the act of

Twittering or Tweeting Via the application of Twitter, in real time,

140-charactered status updates which are stored on an online archive under a retrievable

account are uploaded onto a server, with the dates and times clearly stated on each

Twitter post, allowing the researcher access to them at any time Twitter provides

researchers a convenient, simultaneous and a concise means (due to the cap placed

on the number of up-loadable characters) of archiving and documenting their

presence in the places visited in the instance they were in those places At the same

time, Twitter also allows the simultaneous posting of the photographs taken on site using a smart phone‟s camera and this becomes an invaluable source by which the statuses are verified and validated by means of pictorial evidence

2 Gay Spaces on Text

How are gay spaces depicted in text? The text in this context refers to the

playtexts and scripts written by gay playwrights in Singapore Spatial dimensions,

spatiality, the spaces and the places depicted in a play are often stated explicitly or

referenced in the components of a playtext These include the dialogue – the words

that will be spoken by the actors and heard by the spectators, what Ingarden calls

the Haupttext (the primary text) and the Nebentext (the secondary text), comprising

of the stage directions, prefaces, list of dramatis personae, commentary containing the writer‟s intentions and ideas in relation to staging or earlier productions (1931:

209 – 210) The stage directions or didascalia are the most obvious site for

information concerning the space and how it may function in the creation of

meaning in performance Nonetheless, spatial information may also be garnered

from the dialogue and the basic organisation of plot and dramatic action, which

eventually work towards the locating of the fiction (McAuley 2010: 222)

In traditional playtexts, stage directions commonly contain some indication

of the fictional place, which in most cases, offers a rudimentary indication such as,

“a house in Katong” or a fuller description of pertinent features, and the entrances and the exits of characters They may also include reference to the necessary scenic

features, although this may not be specified in direction, but emerge from the

mechanics of the action as the actors explore the playtext in rehearsal Some

playwrights provide detailed descriptions of fictional place while others imagine

place in the context of the staging conventions of their day and describe aspects of

the presentational space, such as the location of stage doors and windows (McAuley

2010: 222 -223)

This chapter examines the Haupttext and the Nebentext of a select number

of gay Singapore plays written by gay Singaporean playwrights, in an attempt to

decipher how gay space is depicted via text The playtexts have been chosen for

their iconicity and their place in the history of Singapore The playtexts in concern

are: First, Russell Heng‟s Lest the Demons Get to Me (1993) While it is not an

explicitly gay play, it was chosen as it was the first Singapore English play to

explore an alternative sexuality and also because how place is articulated in the play

is representative of how gay spaces were articulated in Singapore plays As Seet

observes, transsexuality and transvestism were artistic means to bring about gay

issues to the fore (1999); second, Otto Fong‟s Another Tribe (1992 trans Tan), the

first locally written play in Chinese on gay identities and subjectivities and being

gay in Singapore; third, Yak Aik-Wee‟s Streetwalkers (2009), the case in which a

popular gay cruising spot becomes inscribed to a play; fourth, Alfian Sa‟at‟s Asian

Boys Trilogy published recently as a collection of plays (2010), especially Asian

Boys Vol 2 – Landmarks (2003) as they were the first Singapore plays to deal

explicitly with the notion of gay space and named gay places in Singapore

2.1 Lest The Demons Get to Me (1993)

ACT ONE SCENE ONE (The scene is in a rented room in an apartment probably somewhere in Geyland, and furnished in a way typical of a flat in that

neighbourhood… Kim Choon, the Bugis Street transvestite, stumbles in all dolled up and singing the last few lines of the theme song from “The Final Night of Madame Chin”.) (Heng 1993)

Consider how the play, centred on the transvestite character Kim Choon is

set There are no specifics regarding the location of the place, no landmarks and no

addresses It is simply situated “probably somewhere in Geylang” (Heng 1993)

While the location is named, much uncertainty and fuzziness surround its

co-ordinates Even the playwright acknowledges the setting as an unsure notion, by means of the word, “probably” The generic nature of its location could “probably” allow the play to be transplanted and placed in any locale The play is set in a

probable location, which in turn speaks of how the situation that is explored in that

play is a probability in any part of Singapore Yet more pressing is the issue of how

the location enforces a stereotype representation of alternative sexuality in

Singapore - the characters are considered taboo and can only exist in the fringes of

society In this case, the area associated with Singapore‟s vice and prostitution

district – Geylang

The other place that is prominently named is Bugis Street:

KC: Not Anita, the singer, but Anita, my best friend, who works

with me on Bugis Street (29) KC: But no, I don‟t want to talk about it My friend or my sister, as

we call each other on Bugis Street… (29) KC: …announcing his intention to be there with some of his

friends to witness the passing of Bugis Street… (30) KC: I am going to be there for the final night of Bugis Street with

some friends (30)

Bugis Street is further mentioned on pages 32, 33, 34, 36, 49 With Bugis

Street being mentioned so significantly in the dialogue, the fact that the play is set

in Geylang, becomes obliterated This means that the place is irrelevant to the play

and serves as a backdrop for the presentation of other issues Bugis Street is not

actualised in the setting of the play and the characters never set foot on Bugis Street

The location in this play is referenced to, but the play is not set in the location that

is named While the action may be located to Singapore, it cannot be rooted in

tangible reality, which is why place in this play is a constantly deferred sign with

the characters rooted only via proxy Gay space appears thus as mediated, deferred

and cannot be conclusive or concretised

Significantly, the characters in Lest the Demons Get to Me, are never found

outdoors All the action occurs behind closed doors and screens – “in the same room” This reflects how homosexuals and people of alternative sexuality were supposed to behave in the 1990s and even to this day in 2011, are compelled to live

private lives and under a shroud of secrecy This arguably appears to be changing

with the advent of Pinkdot, but is subject to much controversy in part due to a

contention regarding the binary of public and private space and will be explored

further in the later chapters Lest The Demons Get to Me ends with the character

Kim Choon indoors, reading a birthday card and holding an air ticket to America

The audience is left with a tableau of Kim Choon changing back and forth from a dress to men‟s clothes while the lights fade out The ambiguous ending suggests a glimpse of possibility, that Kim Choon might be able to live out her secret life,

openly as a woman rather than a man, however, this possibility is not found and

cannot be found in Singapore She is entrapped and the only way she can find her

place in society is to leave Singapore and to find her place in a foreign land

2.2 Another Tribe (1992)

Another Tribe or <<异 族>> in Chinese, explores the metaphorical space of

the closet and homosexuals “coming out” in Singapore to claim some semblance of

place The original Chinese title translates literally to mean “Another Ethnicity” and

inherent in its meaning is Otto Fong‟s trope that being homosexual in Singapore is

as ordinary as that of encountering a different race However, the setting of the play

is generic and ambiguous, shifting and without co-ordinates The only scene which

contains a tangible place setting and where the characters Bobby, William and Chao

Yi first meet Lai Xing, is set in a nameless “dance club where homosexuals

frequent” (<一个同性恋者常去的舞厅>) (3) A large part of the rest of the play is set in various nightmarish dreamscapes, in the mind of Chao Yi, where emaciated

bodies writhe and dance on the stage as they surround the characters (2); or

mythological characters like Justice Bao and a Taoist priest wrestle with the Chao

Yi (8); and resurrected zombies suffocate Chao Yi (15 – 16) The formlessness of

the dreamscape that represents the place setting, speaks of the placeless-ness of

homosexuals living in Singapore in the 1990s Homosexuals were actively

prosecuted during that time, with raids and police entrapments (Au 2009) and it was

inevitable that the homosexual community in Singapore had to live practically

under the radar and in hiding, as the characters in the play articulate:

Bobby: I would advise you not to follow in my footsteps I

was stealthy and hiding all the time, but in the end, the only person I sleep with is me

William: Bobby…

Bobby: I believed that I was and am a law-abiding citizen: I

always flush after I use the toilet; when I am waiting for the train, I stand behind the yellow line! When I travel into Johor, I fill my petrol tank to the brim…

but all these for whom? (points at the audience) For them? A shameless heterosexual couple, may kiss publicly on the MRT from Orchard to Bishan, but we have to run sneakily into the toilets and still be arrested by the Police!

Police: Sir, please don‟t be rash, we will help you

Bobby: Help me? You fucking police are the ones who

pushed me to the brink! When I went to East Coast Park, I was arrested! At Hong Lim Park, I was arrested! Now I am going to jump from this building, and you are here to interfere? If I climb down, you will surely send me to Tan Tock Seng Hospital!

(18 trans Tan)

What Fong has done is to incorporate a social document recording the

arrests of the homosexual community in Fort Road and in Hong Lim Park into the

dialogue of the play However this alternative piece of History is inevitably read as

a piece of imaginative fiction That it is framed between the nightmare scenes

further obfuscate its reality There is an issue with the treatment of place in gay

Singapore plays, for places which might bear importance to the gay community in

Singapore are merely mentioned in passing The playwright in an attempt to

remember the place, names the place in the text of the play, but does not carry the

thought any further The places are named, but the question, “What next?” is not

answered These words come to mind:

A map says to you, “Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.” It says, “I am the earth in the palm of your hand Without me, you are alone and lost.”

And indeed you are Were all the maps in this world destroyed and vanished under the direction of some malevolent hand, each man would

be blind again, each city be made a stranger to the next, each landmark becomes a meaningless signpost pointing to nothing (Markham 1983)

The naming and signposting of space turns these spaces into landmarks and

in turn these landmarks, or points of reference, mark out the place Having marked

the place, a person may then navigate his or her path While the act of nomenclature

is important in that it becomes a mnemonic - an anchor to the memory of that place,

the boundaries of memory and of History as it is being constantly rewritten, are

constantly shifting and people are constantly forgetting as new memories replace the old The naming of place such as of “Hong Lim Park” or “East Coast Park” would thus only hold significance for the people who are acquainted with what

happened in those places and even then, unless they were the parties involved with

the arrests in the 1990s, would only have a vague idea via secondhand reports of

what happened then Likewise, if there were no map attached to the naming of place, with a map loosely taken to mean a specific context in this case, each “landmark becomes a meaningless signpost pointing to nothing.” (Markham 1983)

2.3 Nomenclature as a Strategy

Nomenclature becomes a powerful strategy if a context is attached to it, or if

affirmative or effective actions accompany it Unfortunately, nomenclature is a

strategy that many gay Singapore playwrights superficially employ As an

illustration, in sex.violence.blood.gore, the naming of gay place occurs under the

frame of a heterosexual sadomasochistic game, with the frames of a game and of

playing already limiting how audiences might treat the content:

Jeremy: [Reading from a card] Where do faggots go to get a

quick blowjob in the bushes?

Yin: Fort Road!

Jeremy: Correct!

… Jeremy: Where do the perverted Ah Kuas and Pondans hang

out?

Yin: Changi Village!

[James whacks Yin and she yowls in pleasure]

… Jeremy: Where do all those sex-starved homosexuals go

straying like cats in heat?

Yin: Tanjong Pagar But must wait for 11pm onwards!

[Whack]

Jeremy: Where can you go to test your car‟s suspension by

humping and bumping in its back seats?

Yin: East Coast Park! But remember to stick newspaper on

the window [Whack!]

Jeremy: Where can you find hunky undercover policemen

walking around to trap desperate gay men?

Yin: Bedok Stadium! But got no undercover policewoman

to trap desperate straight men! … (Alfian 2010: 249 – 250 ellipses Tan)

In Mardi Gras (2003), Sharma‟s treatment of place is purely conversational and places such as “Buona Vista Swimming Pool” (5), “Raw”, a gay sauna (6),

“Backstage”, a gay pub (15; 34), “Tabs” for Taboo a gay club (17; 34), “One

Seven”, a gay bathhouse (17; 18), “Waterbar” (22) and “Babylon” (34) are named

in the dialogue Yet, the play occurs indoors, in “a modest living room/kitchen” or

on the “balcony” of that same apartment (2003) The places named in Mardi Gras create a map of gay cruising and sexuality, yet to what effect does such a map have?

Naming in this case enforces the detrimental stereotypes surrounding gay identities

and gay places - that homosexuals are promiscuous and cannot be taken seriously as

their lives revolve around parties, drunkenness and orgiastic debauchery and in

places of vice Ironically, the naming of place also traps the gay characters in such

places That place is encountered as a series of verbalised remarks occurring

indoors, is a manifestation of how gay spaces (and even when they are named as

places), are shut in and cannot exist in the open as space that is accepted and

legitimate In Mardi Gras as with many gay plays in Singapore, gay space is

textualised and created by words and the text However, this text-created space lacks the same performative impetus of Austin‟s Speech-act (Austin 1962) It remains in the realm of the fictive and lacks effect The danger also lies in the

strategy of naming losing its impact, as people become numb or acclimatised to it,

having been used rather flippantly in many gay Singapore plays Worse still is how nomenclature‟s power to affect people diminishes over time, especially for the people who have no memory of the actual historical events

2.4 Streetwalkers (2009)

Streetwalkers by Yak Aik-Wee centres on the inter-relationships and the

intertwining of the lives of three men of different age groups and social strata as

they navigate their way along a dark street alley in Singapore The treatment of

place in this play comes across as curious, for while the setting of the play occurs in

a place that is deemed to be associated with the gay community in Singapore, the

place, a street, is not a place of permanence like a dwelling place but a place of

passage It is a place of transit, a path where a person transmutes from point A to B

The place, otherwise known as the distance found in the in-between of two locales

therefore is a liminal space and to situate the characters in such a space identifies

them as passing, transient and temporary

While the gay club Taboo is mentioned in the dialogue, “I just came from Taboo,” (7) as homage to a landmark and an icon situated amidst the gay landscape, the play progresses in a setting that is generic and mostly nameless The playscript

makes no reference to the name of the place, but situates the play along the likes of

a “quiet, dimly lit street” (1), “at the same street” (7), “a different street in a

crowded area” (9), a generic and nameless “coffeehouse” (20), “Gerard‟s flat” (14) which is known to be somewhere in Queenstown (38), “the street” (36), “Gilbert‟s place” (47) and another nameless “quiet street” (66) Although there is no mention

of the place in the script, the collateral – the flyer and the review of the play in the

newspapers have placed and named the setting as Ang Siang Hill:

Their separate lives become intertwined through accidental and deliberate encounters in the dark alleys of Chinatown‟s Ang Siang Hill

(Streetwalkers Performance Flyer 2009)

The three men navigate their ways to find love, wealth and happiness against the backdrop of Ann Siang Place, a one-way street once

populated by remittance houses and letter-writing shops – catering to early Chinese immigrants (Streetwalkers Performance Flyer 2009) Streetwalkers is ostensibly about three men who work the neon-lit streets of Ang Siang Hill where gay men cruise for friendship, sex or transactions (The Straits Times 3rd August 2009)

Therein lies the curious case of the iconicity of the actual locale, as a

popular gay cruising spot, informing the staging (projected images of Ang Siang

Road were used to demarcate the place in the staging of the play) and the audience

perception of the play Streetwalkers was written in a manner which allowed for the

artistic license of the director to stage it in any place and context, however the

paraphernalia and its associated contents have fixed the location of the play in a

particular locale in Singapore – Ann Siang Hill As a result of this debut staging,

Streetwalkers and the themes it explores, will forever be fixed in a particular spot

In Streetwalkers, we see an echo of Aronson‟s commentary on Tony Kushner‟s

Angels in America (1993) The play in essence, ranges through unremarkable

apartments and streets that carry no particular resonance except what is bestowed

upon them by their occupants The street then becomes a place for those who do not

fit anywhere else It is the place of the displaced, the misplaced, the outsiders, the

adventurers, the seekers and the searchers (See Aronson 2005: 182 -193)

2.5 Asian Boys Vol 1 - Dreamplay (2000)

Alfian‟s Dreamplay explores an incarnation, in which the body becomes a

personification of idealised spatial co-ordinates Space and place are personified by

the human being who carries the title of the various districts on the pageant sash –

“Miss Toa Payoh”, “Miss Katong”, “Miss Sengkang” and “Miss Bedok” -

representatives embodying all the qualities of the estate, having won the

intra-district contest, for a place to be crowned the representative beauty queen of

Singapore and then to participate on a world-wide stage However, Dreamplay

subverts the notion of the pageant and the representational politics of a place by

extension, as the ladies are in fact sexualised drag queens (See Sc 2 – 3) The

placing of drag queens in a beauty contest seems to be a strategy to disrupt the

heteronormativity of the idealised representations of space and appears to be an

effort in reclaiming what is associated with the heteronormative for the queer In

Scene 6 the body as representative of the space of places is further explored We are brought to a coolie‟s quarters and the human body takes on the markings of

physical space when the character Ah Seng maps the countries China and Nanyang

and re-names the parts of the body with the names of those countries on the

character Ah Hock‟s back Ah Seng also fingers Ah Hock in the anus and names

that part of the body as Nanyang Nanyang was Singapore‟s name in olden times

and to associate the anus and the act of sodomy with the country, questions and

subverts inherent assumptions about the sovereignty of the country Subsequently,

the text of Dreamplay mentions certain gay places, as if to document their existence

- Treetop at Holiday Inn, Pebble Bar at the Hotel Singapura Forum, Yangtze

Cinema, Ann Siang Hill (Sc 5) Yet these mentions are but superficial treatments

of those spaces and bear no efficacy for they are framed in the form of a

dreamscape or phantasmagoria, becoming mythic as they are woven with other

narratives In Scene 7, the news of the arrests at Tanjong Rhu is made reference to

Yet it is contextualised against the backdrop of the Japanese Occupation, making it

doubly removed and alienated to a generation that has already forgotten about the

arrests at Tanjong Rhu While Dreamplay explores certain strategies to upset the

heteronormative politics behind the representation of places and also provides an

avenue to create a social document of the actual gay spaces in Singapore as part of

its script, how it ends is telling The layering of the myth of the monkey god

searching for enlightenment in the west, speaks of the on-going search for

validation by the gay community in Singapore Agnes, the goddess character is

handed a dildo – a tool of self-gratification and perhaps of self-delusion by Boy the

protagonist The play closes with the switching on of disco lights and music (sc 9),

attesting to how transient, sensationalised and short-lived the state of gay space in

Singapore is - When the party ends and the strobe lights dim, so too the revelry and

the imagined communitas of a floating gay community It is ironic how the youth

wing of the People Action Party, the ruling party in 2008, in its attempt to connect

with the populace, adopted the tagline, “Your Place, Your Part, Your Party”

(ChannelNewsAsia last accessed 12th Dec 2011, 1723hrs)

2.6 Asian Boys Vol 2 - Landmarks (2003)

Landmarks is a volume containing eight short plays and as it is befitting of

the title, each play is framed by a place in Singapore that contains a history of

homosexual cruising – Katong Fugue, Maxwell Food Centre, Raffles City

Rendezvous, California Dreaming, The Kings of Ann Siang Hill, Downstream

Delta, My Own Private Toa Payoh and The Widow of Fort Road The umbrella title,

Landmarks, is apt as this is a landmark text, as it is the first time in the history of

Singapore playwriting that explicitly marks out and names the homosexual cruising

spots in Singapore, elevating what are largely hidden areas to prominence in the

text by making the names of the places, the titles of the eight short scripts Like a

map, the co-ordinates of gay spaces are given visibility and tangibility via

signposting in Landmarks

2.6a Katong Fugue

The setting in Katong Fugue, is located in a house along the Katong area

and the notions of personal space, belonging, home and place are explored - the character Son says, “It‟s the only place in this house,” in response to the character Mother saying, “You‟ve locked your room again,” (1) Although the house is built beside the sea, a symbol of vast space and freedom, the characters are not the turtle

(3; 6) that swims freely in the sea Even then, the turtle that is talked about is a

turtle that is grounded and vulnerable in its egg-laying The space of the beach then

becomes a dangerous place This is not a free space that is presented, but a space of

fear The action of the vignette occurs indoors and within the walls of heavily

guarded and locked rooms Like the metaphorical space of the closet, gay space

cannot expand outdoors, but has to remain secretive, locked in and spoken about in

hushed tones How space and place has been set here, echoes the numerous gay

plays in Singapore that have either been consciously or unconsciously set indoors

There is a fear of the outdoors The homosexual person cannot venture out into the

open for fear of ridicule, grief, vulnerability and censure The walls around the

space of the closet hence are high, to give the homosexual person a means of

protecting himself Inherent in this piece is also the generic fuzziness surrounding

the naming of the place that is found in the likes of Lest the Demons Get to Me In

this case, the reluctance to name the specifics of the place represents a fear of

identification and echoes the political climate of Singapore, where even in private

spaces, homosexuality is considered illegal and the outing of a homosexual‟s sexual

orientation could result in detrimental effect

2.6b Supper at Maxwell

Maxwell Food Centre is an interesting place of choice to highlight in the

text, for it is often identified as a gay place, due to its close proximity to the now

defunct gay sauna at Ann Siang Hill (the details of this locale will be expounded

upon later) and the clubs of the 1990s and early 2000s which made up the gay

clubbing scene of Singapore, namely the now defunct Why Not, Happy and Mox

Bar and Café Maxwell is still crowded on the weekends from the stream of gay

party-goers from the likes of new establishments like DYMK, and the evergreen

Taboo and Tantric Bar near Neil Road and Duxton Nonetheless, Alfian‟s treatment

of Maxwell rewrites the sexual undercurrent of the place with a bittersweet, even

romantic take about finding love in the homosexual circles as the character Danny

is enamoured with a deaf man he has seen in the club while his friend Gordon, is

secretly in love with Danny While outside of the play, cruising between men does

take place in Maxwell, Alfian has written a narrative over the seedy nature of the

place to allow for the capacity of romantic love to occur in that place and to provide

us with an alternative understanding or re-understanding of the place Maxwell Food

Centre

2.6c, Raffles City Rendezvous

This play deviates slightly from the previous two, for unlike Katong Fugue

and Supper at Maxwell, the happenings that occur in Raffles City Rendezvous are

not set in the title location The place Raffles City, is mentioned 4 times, including

the title of the piece in the discourse that occurs consisting of two mentions in the

beginning (13) and another time two pages down (15) While the place does not

feature prominently as the set for the dialogue, with the two characters situated out

of that place, it is constantly referenced to In this context, there is a disjunction

between the physical body and the spatial co-ordinates that are referenced to Yet

the utterance of the name conjures up the images associated with that place The

mention of the place creates an intertext which the audience has to negotiate with,

in their minds‟ eyes The cognitive processing of the auditory information of the

place, in this case the utterance of the name Raffles City creates a first-order

cognitive state and although there is no real object for the contents of perception to

concern, it is represented in the perceptual system (Chalmers 1996: 220-221) This

cognitive result of the utterance is bi-directional and is experienced simultaneously

as the words are uttered, occurring first in the actor who utters the words and at the

same time in the audience member watching the actor uttering those words Thus

there is no need for the characters to be situated in Raffles City, for the mention of

Raffles City recreates Raffles City in the minds of both the actors and the audience

Place then becomes an citation that exists as part of the plot development in Raffles

City Rendezvous, but also acts as a constant referent to the audience‟s own

experiences in Raffles City and plays on the idea as to whether the audience has any

prior knowledge regarding Raffles City as a prime cruising spot (trevvy.com 2010)

The audience then constantly negotiates with the induced cognitive images and the

memories of the actual locale with that of what is happening on the stage, to frame

and to contextualise the dialogue that occurs between the characters Mike and Kiat

as happening within that space It can be argued that the mention of the space is not

so important to the development of the plot as compared to how space is treated in

Katong Fugue and Supper at Maxwell The intertext that occurs for an audience,

who knows about the gay happenings at Raffles City, termed as the headquarters

for gay cruising (trevvy.com 2010), will be different for an audience who is clueless

about those gay encounters, creating a different construction, perception and

subsequent visualisation of that place At the same time, to situate the sexualised act

of a threesome outside of the place Raffles City in Landmarks desexualises the

actual place There exists an attempt to disassociate the space with the sexualised

cruising it is associated with The place of Raffles City is the Derridean deferred

sign It is referred to but it is not actualised and constantly evades direct meaning

making Place here is always at a distance from its actual locale and thus is always

at a distance from any supposed clarity of consciousness (The Internet

Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last accessed January 2012)

2.6d California Dreaming

There is a curious mangling of time and space in California Dreaming

When Alfian wrote Landmarks in 2003, the annual Nation party had just concluded

its run and so the script was written post-event, yet, Landmarks was staged in

February 2004 by local theatre company Wild Rice (dir Heng 2004), and the party

in the script is also framed as an occurrence on that night that was yet to happen in

the scene It is a projected party the characters are getting ready for and this made

the script prescient before the landmark Nation IV party in August 2004 that

attracted such a large following, it caused all other Nation parties to be banned in

Singapore While the setting in this short play is unknown, what is made tangible is

the projection of the space the characters were going to be in – Sentosa, as the character Leon says “The whole of Sentosa is going to be pulsating with our

presence,” (22-23) and the space the characters hope to be in – Los Angeles,

California, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Sydney and San Francisco (24) Yet, it is

telling that the party is situated on Sentosa, the island playground of Singapore that